The Losers is Solid Fun

The Losers is fun, solid entertainment. I probably won’t own it on Blu Ray but it delivers the good humored action that the genre should, whether you watch it over and over again or just once.

Review: The Losers

It nails the comic book tone better than most comic book movies, even the big guns. It doesn’t try to be the definitive Losers movie. It’s clearly just one episode of The Losers, like any issue of a comic book. That may be why I don’t feel as personal about it, but also why I’ll look forward to any further adventures that come next.

The Losers really is a team movie. Their missions actually require everyone’s unique talents. It’s not just here’s a bunch of stars in an action scene.

It has a lot of fun with the clichés of the action genre. Nostalgia for the action scene that just ended is cool. The bad guy is so blatantly evil, like all arch nemeses demonstrate in gratuitous displays of villainry, but he’s just having fun with it. Jason Patric is hilarious. They did give him the best lines to work with, but he plays the hell out of them.

The banter gives The Losers and old school feel, even with new school visuals. They speak in sentence fragments without ever specifying their subject, but we know exactly what they’re talking about because it’s visual. The dialogue is crisp and snappy, with plenty of one-liners but also actually deals with the character issues that usually go unspoken in these movies, and characters take responsibility.

They don’t waste time explaining what’s going on. They just decide. That gives us a lot of credit because we know all the standard plots of action movies. It gives us more confidence in the characters that they don’t have to dwell on it. They just act.

It’s shot in the shaky zoomy camera style but they do cut to locked off close-ups so you can at least get your bearings. There is a beautiful shot involving a broken shard of a mirror. That’s how to use CGI. Don’t try to make stuff that doesn’t look real. Use it to create an artistic shot that couldn’t exist in camera.

The climactic action sequence in a shipping dock felt a little cheap to me. I’ve seen too many TV shows recently with action around storage crates, because that’s an accessible location for TV. The Losers does have a badass finish that you couldn’t see on TV though.

There’s no secret about setting The Losers up for a sequel, and probably a whole franchise. It’s blatant, but good for them. Everyone wants a franchise so just go for it. I just hope they signed Chris Evans and Zoe Saldana before because they’re going to be a lot more expensive next time.